These reasons are too solid to admit of a reply; but I foresee you will oppose custom to reason; you will tell me there is a fatality in some things which hurries us away in spite of ourselves; that we can, in no case whatever, bear the lie; and that, when an affair is gone a certain length, it is impossible to avoid fighting or infamy. We will examine into the validity of this argument. Do not you remember a distinction you once made, on an important occasion, between real and apparent honour? Under which of these classes shall we rank that in question? For my part, I cannot see that it will even admit of a doubt. What comparison is there between the glory of cutting another’s throat, and the testimony of a good conscience? And of what importance is the idle opinion of the world, set in competition with true honour, whose foundation is rooted in the heart? Can we be deprived of virtues we really possess by false aspersions of calumny? Does the insult of a drunken man prove such insults deserved? Or does the honour of the virtuous and prudent lie at the mercy of the first brute he meets? Will you tell me that fighting a duel shews a man to have courage, and that this is sufficient to efface the dishonour, and prevent the reproach, due to all other vices? I would ask you, what kind of honour can dictate such a decision? Or what arguments justify it? On such principles a knave need only fight, to cease to be a knave; the assertions of a liar become true when they are maintained at the point of the sword; and, if you were even accused of killing a man, you have only to kill a second, to prove the accusation false. Thus virtue, vice, honour, infamy, truth, and falsehood, all derive their existence from the event of a duel: a gallery of small arms is the only court of justice; there is no other law than violence, no other argument than murder: all the reparation due to the insulted, is to kill them, and every offence is equally washed away by the blood of the offender or the offended. If wolves themselves could reason, would they entertain maxims more inhuman than these? Judge yourself, from the situation you are in, whether I exaggerate their absurdity? What is it you resent? That the lie has been given you on an occasion wherein you actually asserted a falsehood. Do you think to destroy the truth, by killing him you would punish for having told it? Do you consider that, in risking the success of a duel, you call heaven to witness the truth of a lie, and impiously bid the supreme disposer of events to support the cause of injustice, and give the triumph to falsehood? Does not such absurdity shock you? Does not such impiety make you shudder? Good God! what a wretched sense of honour is that, which is less afraid of vice than reproach; and will not permit that another should give us the lie, which our own hearts had given us before?